


A Forest Grows in Dayport

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Thief (Video Game Original Series), Thief (Video Games)
Genre: AU, F/M, Mild Sexual Content, Scenes of torture, The Trickster Wins AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-04-05 16:44:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14048517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: Back when Garrett was a boy, before the Trickster won, in the long hungry years of his life between his mother's death and the day he fell in with the Keepers, a man told him he'd been born to hang.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I hugely appreciate all comments, and constructive criticism is welcome. It was written for the Writers Anonymous all-narrative style. The word count turned out to be too long, but the style kind of stuck. The title is adapted from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith, and the quoted ritual at the beginning comes from the first Thief game.
> 
> Thanks to tafferling for betaing and thank you for reading.

 

**A Forest Grows in Dayport**

 

_Night smother light, black brick lamp, done with bright_

_Dew and damp, smother tight, dark and hide, foolsie sight_

_Stay inside, fear the night, call the dark, call the black_

_Bringsie forth, I call it back_

_\-- The Trickster’s Ritual_

 

**One**

 

I

Back when Garrett was a boy, before the Trickster won, in the long hungry years of his life between his mother's death and the day he fell in with the Keepers, a man told him he'd been born to hang.

That had been Long Thomas, a vicious bastard with nothing but spite in his soul, whose common-law wife was the sister of Scarrow Green. Scarrow was a wannabe-entrepreneur Garrett had fallen in with, who’d seen an opportunity in the hordes of homeless street-rats going begging on the streets. So he'd set up shop, charged a couple of coppers to any boy who wanted to learn how to be a better thief, safe in the warm confines of Scarrow's filthy kitchen. Their coppers bought them food and shelter, and the chance to practice the art of thieving -- and it was an art: it was Scarrow who'd first taught Garrett that -- without having to worry about the bluecoats or the gallows. It was in that kitchen that he’d learned how to charm purses from pockets, practising on a coat with a pocket as hung about with delicate silver bells as a pampered cat.

It was the sort of set-up Garrett might have instinctively distrusted, except that Scarrow genuinely did have a bit of a soft heart. More to the point, he was selfish, and it it didn't take long for Garrett to figure out exactly what Scarrow had to gain from his altruistic little thieves' den.

Scarrow liked women. He liked how having the kids around made him look like some kind of gentleman philanthropist. No easier method to charm a woman's legs open than dunning her into thinking you a soft-hearted cove who gave a damn about the well-being of children.

Scarrow was a selfish bastard, no doubt, but he wasn't a dangerous one -- just a tender idiot who kept an eye out for the main chance and an easy bit of cunt.

It wasn't hard to see which were the kids who got the most attention -- the talented ones who could earn their keep, and the pretty little weaklings, who couldn't, but were the sort of blond-haired consumptive brats a woman might melt over. Her heart for them, and her cunt for Scarrow. A fine little scam, and if the other kids, the ones who weren't talented or pretty, sickened and died, well, too bad for them. Not like Scarrow was made of money. Not like he could help them all.

Garrett had benefited from Scarrow's largesse himself. When he was ten, something he'd eaten had made him sicken, leaving him with a pain in his belly so bad he'd thought it was like to burst. His liquified guts poured out of him in a stream of burning watery shit, leaving him so weak he could barely push himself away from the puddle of vomit by his cheek. It was Scarrow who'd paid for the tonic that had saved his life, and afterwards Garrett had been so grateful he'd danced attendance on the man, had done everything he could to show him how grateful he was. Not an emotion he was used to, gratitude, and neither was adoration, but he'd adored Scarrow after that.

It was only years later Garrett counted up the value of all the stolen goods he'd handed over willingly to Scarrow, and realised he must have paid him back for the cost of the tonic a hundredfold. He'd been torn between anger at himself for being duped and grudging respect for Scarrow. Still, Scarrow had saved his life, and not just with the tonic: the skills Garrett had learned and practised in Scarrow's kitchen had probably saved his life several times over too. The bastard had kept him warm and he'd kept him safe.

At least until Long Thomas started turning up. Unlike Scarrow, who was more of a con-artist in those days, Long Thomas was still a thief, and the dangerous sort, his dues fully paid up with the Dockside Wardens. He was also a cunt, free with his fists and with Scarrow's women, and Scarrow was scared shitless of him. Scarrow might play tough, but Garrett could see how he physically shrank on the days when Long Thomas was around, sitting at his table, judging each boy and finding them wanting.

Especially Garrett. He took against Garrett for one reason or other, probably because back then Garrett hadn't learnt when to keep his smart-mouthed comments to himself.

It came to a head one night when Long Thomas had suggested taking their training to the rooftops. He had a job in the works, something that needed a likely sort of lad who was small and quick and had a head for heights. He'd bet them all they couldn't circumvate the spire of the Hammerite chapel before the clock tower chimed out ten o'clock.

Garrett did it. The drop to the cobbles below had made him feel physically sick, but he did it, and the other boys and Scarrow were all cheering him when he dropped back down to the rooftop, grinning, just at the first of the chimes began to sound.

And then as he'd turned to claim his prize, Long Thomas had slammed his blackjack into Garrett's belly. The back of Garrett's skull struck a chimney as he fell, his vision blurring with a sharp spike of pain. And then as he lay flat on his back, winded and crying with the pain, a boot pressed down on his throat, crushing his windpipe, stopping his breath. He never had been strong, especially back then -- a skinny little rat of a boy, scrabbling at Long Thomas's ankle with fingernails bitten to the quick. That was when Long Thomas made his pronouncement, and it had the air of a prophecy.

Garrett would hang.

Those words had come back to Garrett three years when the guillotine was installed in Hangman's Square three years later. So much quicker, so much easier, and no more hangings. Long Thomas was dead by then, and he'd gone to the gallows himself, but the memory of his promise was so vivid Garrett could feel the boot at his throat, could smell the reek of stale alcohol and sour unwashed skin. But the City was done with hangings -- the guillotine was the modern way to deal with criminals. And if some were disappointed with the loss of the visual spectacle of bodies dangling from gibbets, they'd make do with heads on spikes and the thrill of spurting blood.

Long Thomas had been wrong, and the spectre that had haunted Garrett, the man who he was still terrified of five years on, whom he still saw sometimes, waking from a restless sleep to see looming over his pallet, began to fade. Because he'd been _wrong_.

Except, of course, he hadn't been.

 

ii

Strange how easy failure was in the end. A single moment of clumsiness at the very moment he should have been safe. He'd swapped the fake Eye for the real thing, now cradled safely like a baby in his arms. His own stolen eye seemed to wink up at him. A scuff of a boot on stone, and even then he thought he might have gotten away with it, that the Trickster hadn't heard. At least until the first vine came whipping out of the darkness and twined around his throat, choking off his airways.

He'd failed. More vines wrapped around his wrists and ankles, and the Trickster, that monstrous hulking figure with its goaty musk, its reek of seed and spice and honey, came dancing towards him, its delicate hooves click-clacking on the stone. Its thighs were thick with wiry hair, phallus dangling between them, its gleaming black eyes glittering as it plucked the real Eye from his hand. He'd expected to be killed there and then, but instead he’d been forced to watch as the Trickster completed the ritual and set darkness loose upon the world.

He failed. And he’d been hanged for it. Long Thomas had been right after all.

 

iii

They choked and beat and broke him, stripped him naked. Left him to burn and to freeze, wrapped him in branches and vines and cobwebs, dangled him like an insect caught in a spider's web. They starved him until he wept from hunger, then forced half-rotted food down his gullet, branches twining into his mouth, pushing in more and more, until he could do nothing else but swallow or choke to death. He ate and ate and ate until his stomach was distended, and he vomited it all up.

Vines dripped water into his parched mouth, never quite enough to quench his thirst. Only when it rained, the freezing raindrops pattering down through the leaves, did Garrett get the chance to drink his fill. So long as he was on his back, anyway, or at an angle where he could tilt his head to catch the raindrops in his mouth. Most of the time he was facing downwards, and the icy water would pool uselessly between the vines that held him close, soaking his hair and running down into his remaining eye, mingling with his burning tears.

He had no memory of them moving him from the Maw. They fed him drugs that dragged him into a black unnatural sleep, or conjured up visions, that made him thrash against the vines that held him. He'd scream and beg for mercy, for death, while Long Thomas, the terror of his boyhood, crept along the webbing of vines and branches towards him like a great and terrible spider.

They moved him again when he was sleeping, and more than once.

A great forest. A ruined building. Or the Trickster's court, where Garrett played the part of a fool, his grimy naked body draped in a ragged motley -- the tan and gristly red of flayed human skin. The throne room was a miserable place, with gnarled branches snaking in through broken windows. A few raggedy pagans sat scattered around. They looked almost as whipped and cowed and miserable as Garrett must have done.

Vines wrapped around his wrists and ankles forced him to dance and caper for their amusement like a marionette, and afterwards they let him feed himself from the groaning table piled high with rotting food, overripe fruit and meat crawling with maggots. Garrett, leashed like a dog, but used to keeping his hatred and fury hidden, ate what he could, knowing he might not get another chance. He cowered at the sound of those click-clacking little goat's feet prancing closer, the goaty stink of the god-thing as it danced around him. The Trickster gripped the vine around his throat, and Garrett, his mouth full of meat on the turn, which flooded his mouth with nauseating juices with every bite, whimpered and clawed at the table as the Trickster hauled him backwards.

It wasn't the first time he'd starved, and he knew he wasn't really starving now -- not really. He still remembered that one bad summer, after a series of failed harvests, when there'd been rioting on the streets at the price of bread. He'd been about seven then, his mother gone only a couple of years, so he hadn't quite forgotten what it meant to be loved and still occasionally dreamed of warm arms around him. There was still a stupid part of him that dreamed she might be coming back, but that summer had been enough to crush that hope right out of him.

He'd never known hunger like it, before or since, but the memory of it had never quite left him, no matter what he ate. He'd scraped himself through somehow, crawling the streets from dawn to dusk, searching for enough pieces of dogshit to earn him a scant handful of pennies from the tannery in the stews. Once they'd tried to cheat him, claiming the bucket hadn't been filled up enough, and as punishment, not only wouldn't he get his coin, but they'd keep the bucket and its filthy stinking contents too. He'd sworn at them, got beaten beaten bloody for his pains, but he hadn't begged them for mercy. Not then.

But he was begging now. He wept and clawed at his leash, pleading with the Trickster to let him have a little more, until the leash tightened to hard around his throat he couldn't breathe.

It was never long before they hanged him again and for the first time in a long while he was thinking about Long Thomas again. Long Thomas with his boot on a boy's throat, crushing the hope from him. Telling him he was born to hang.

And he'd been right all along, the bastard. Garrett had always assumed hanging would kill him. Instead, he'd just wish it had.

 

iv

There were others sometimes too. Other bodies with him in the trees. Some kicked and fought and struggled and screamed; some tried to call out to Garrett, begging him to help them, begging him to tell them what was happening, what would be done with them. Figures moved through the forest paths beneath them, keeping their heads down, while the men around Garrett screamed at them for help, for mercy, to cut them down. Once, a pagan boy, trailing along behind his father, lifted his head and stared up at Garrett, his eyes wide and frightened, much as Garrett had watched public executions when he'd been young. The boy's father slapped him hard for looking up, for doing anything but keeping his eyes fixed on the path. It was a slap born of terror, and the two hurried on while the man suspended beside Garrett screamed. Thankfully he didn't stay long. The others never did. They weren't special, not like Garrett. He was the Trickster's prize. The stringsy puppet manfool, who'd thought he could play at stealing from a god and win.

One day he slept and when he woke he was alone.

And then he wasn't.

It might have been a dream. Or a hallucination. He kept thinking it couldn't be real, even as the two figures cut through the wines and branches that held him and lowered him gently to the ground. There was a moment when he was clasped in someone's arms, and then they pulled away and he'd left a smear of snot and tears on their woollen robes. He clung to them like a frightened child, begging them not to leave him this time. Not this time. Not again. He couldn't do it again. He begged them to take him with them, and they gently prised his hands away. Something small and hard and cold was pressed into his loosely clenched fist, and then he was crumpled on the bank of mossy earth at the base of a tree and they were gone.

If the Keepers said anything to him before they left, he didn't remember.

What he did remember was cursing them out. Screaming the worst invectives after them, or trying to, same as he'd sworn at the tanner who'd stolen his hard-earned pail of dogshit from him, back before he'd learned the virtues of keeping your mouth tight shut and your rage well hidden. His throat was so ragged and parched the only sound he could make was a soundless croak. The hard little thing they pushed into his hand was a key of solid iron, threaded onto a leather thong. He stared at it, unable in his weakened state to make sense of it. In the end, he gave up, and hung the thong around his neck. The key felt like a shard of ice against his chest.

He slumped back against the roots, ready to give up, ready, at last, to die, but the sound of something crashing through the trees was enough to spur him back to his feet. He stumbled over the roots, unused to walking, and the trees seemed to claw at him, intent on stopping him from escaping. Every inch of him was left scoured and scraped to ribbons, his palms, his face, his thighs, the soles of his feet, by thorn bushes that whipped at him, tried to scratch out his remaining eye.

He'd thought himself lost in a vast forest, but as he scrambled down a mossy bank, he gave a cry of shock as something sharp and jagged ripped a gash in the back of his thigh. At the bottom, he crumpled, breathing hard and fast, his scream a soundless thing howled into the ground. The bank hadn't been earth at all, but a ruined stone wall beneath a thin blanket of earth and moss. The remnants of what had once been a window gaped like a missing tooth in a jaw, jagged shards of broken glass remaining in the frame. Another shape he'd taken to be a crooked tree in the gloom turned out to be a twisted metal lamp-post, its light long since dead. He pressed one hand to the back of his thigh, and drew the other across his cheek, although there were no tears to wipe away.

This was no forest, but a City street, the trees pushing up through brick and stone and concrete, ripping up the foundations of the buildings and growing up through rooftops. Terracotta tiles littered the ground beneath Garrett's bare feet like fallen autumn leaves.

He frowned at the skyline, picked out the familiar shape of a crane and reoriented himself through force of habit. He knew that skyline, altered though it might have been: this was Dayport. How long must he have been out for a forest to have grown up like this?

Shivering, confused and frightened, and with his blood running down into the back of his knee, he felt his grip on consciousness slipping. He leaned against a tree, breathing hard, legs ready to crumple, fighting dizziness.

Something moved in the bushes. His head snapped up. Gripping the tree for support, he swiped up a chunk of rubble, but he was so weak he could barely close his fist around it. His first instinct under normal circumstances would have been to run, but he was bleeding too badly; he wouldn't get far. Even in the darkness the trail would be easy to follow, and they could track him, stalk him, pick him off at their leisure.

But he was angry now, the surging rage he'd carried in his heart since he was a child. He'd learned to keep it in check, first out of fear, then because the Keepers demanded it of him, and finally because he'd recognised how useful that cold steady-eyed fury could be when under control. It didn't cloud the judgement like normal rage, but sharpened it, a tool to focus the mind. And he'd used the tool as any half-decent thief would use a tools at his disposal -- turned it like a spying glass on the fat and rich and privileged, making it easier to strip them of their valuables and every scrap of pride.

Now it was turned on a woman, with elaborate scarification markings around her eyes. She was dressed in a roughly fashioned leather jerkin dyed a dull ochre. A Pagan, but she clasped an infant to her chest and her eyes were bright with terror.

The stone tumbled from his grip -- probably wishful thinking anyway -- and he held his palm up, to show her he meant her no harm. All his clarity of thought fled; he was a fugitive scrambling through a City he didn't recognise any more, and he had no idea whether she might mean _him_ harm.

Well, maybe she didn’t, but somebody did.

From behind, a club slammed into his upper back. It drove him to his knees. with a choking cry of pain. And again it slammed down, on the back of his skull. His vision blackened at the edges, tunnelling away. Feet scuffed in the dirt around his head, the woman hissing something, her voice fierce and insistent. And he heard his own voice too, so slurred it sounded like he was drunk. It came from a great distance, begging them for help.

One last thought flashed through his mind before the darkness claimed him: that he'd once sworn he'd never beg again.

So much for that.


	2. Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Tafferling for betaing. As always all comments are welcome.

 

** ** Two ** **

i

There was a fever, and with it came the dreams.

At the end of the bed Long Thomas squatted like the Grey Hag on Garrett's ankles. He was gaunt and filthy, a rough hessian back pulled over his head and knotted around his neck with fraying twine. At Garrett's shoulders, Seb and Avery, two of his fellow Keeper apprentices, boys who'd done their very best to make his life hell, held him down while he thrashed and begged and screamed. While Long Thomas slit Garret from belly to throat. Tore out his other eye, his tongue, his genitals. All the parts Garrett was most fond of.

And all the while a woman talked to him, gentle as a mother, her voice soft and warm and patient. The perfect nurse, or she would have been if she wasn't fattening him up for the Trickster and his monsters. She treated him like a recalcitrant child, chiding him gently when he knocked the bowl of broth --  _ of poison _ \-- from her hands when she tried to spoon some into his mouth. And when he flung himself from the bed towards the door and inevitably collapsed because his legs were too weak to carry him, she helped him back to bed.

She slathered the wound on his leg with a foul-smelling unguent, helped him to piss and shit and cleaned him up afterwards, let him rest his weight on her when he hobbled around the shack, until he could walk unaided. As if he was no less helpless than the baby.

He'd born a lot of humiliations lately, but this was more than he could bear. But she forced him to bear it. 

He hated her. And then gradually he didn't. He wasn't sure when it stopped, that hatred, only that after weeks of turning his back to her in a sullen silence, he started listening to her when she sang to her infant while it suckled. At first it was pagan songs she sang, but when she realised Garrett was listening she started to sing City songs too, including a lullaby so familiar it made his heart ache. And after a while he wasn't just listening, but watching her too, his eager treacherous gaze following her about the shack, whipped-dog-grateful for every scrap of kindness she showed him.

They only ever threatened him once, and unsurprisingly it wasn't her, but the man. When the woman left to gather food, he came in from outside where he’d been skinning a rabbit, and crossed slowly to the table where Garrett sat. The man gripped his hair, wrenched his head back, and pressed the blade of the fleisching knife to his throat. 

A knife to the throat sharpens a man's mind to another man's message, and this message was made very clear: they helped him, they healed him. And if he betrayed them, the man would flay him. Alive. It wasn't an idle threat or a bluff. Garrett had no doubt he meant it.

And then the knife was gone, and the woman was returning, singing out the names of plants to the child, and laughing delightedly as the child repeated them back. When she stopped in the doorway, her smile slipped a little. She swept her gaze over them, aware something was wrong, but not knowing quite what. The man was smiling, a bland, meaningless smile, and Garrett was glowering, but since he was always glowering, that gave nothing away.

If anything, he was relieved. Their relentless kindness and patience had been starting to wear him down. And it had been nothing more than a warning, man to man. Garrett couldn't blame him for wanting to protect his wife.   
  


ii

One day, they slaughtered a goat, not for its meat, but to daub a symbol on the flimsy door in its blood. Garrett saw, in the moments before the woman dragged him away from the door, the carcass of the goat strung from the trees like an offering. Come away from the door, she told him, and she hoped all the waters would be rising up to carry him away if he let himself be seen.

Seen by what, he wanted to ask, but he kept quiet, figuring the answer wasn't likely to be something he wanted to know. They brought the animals inside, the two remaining goats and the chickens, and they all huddled inside the wattle and daub shack as the Hunt went riding past. 

The hooves of the Hunt were like thunder. A cacophony of screams and shrieks and wild maddened laughter, barks and bellows, and all so loud and so close it made the ground shake. Garrett clasped his hands over his ears, saw the man and the woman exchange a look of horror when the infant woke and began to wail in terror. He'd never seen the woman's hands shake so hard in her rush to stop the child's mouth with a breast, and he closed his eyes to shut out her look of terror and despair.

Afterwards, the a silence was so complete it felt like a storm had passed. The woman shooed the animals out into the garden, and then slumped with her back to them, shoulders shaking with the force of her sobs. The man gave an apologetic grimace, thrust the baby into Garrett's arms, and tried to console her.

It was the first time Garrett had held the baby, and it seemed like the wrong moment to ask what the hell he was supposed to do with it. It squinted up at him, equally as dubious as he was. He took it outside cautiously, waiting for them to tell him not to go out there, but they seemed to think the danger had passed. The ground outside was all churned up, and the carcass of the goat had gone

Through the trees he could see another shape, not the goat, although at first he thought it might have been. A crumpled shape like a broken doll. Garrett's arms tightened around the baby and he turned back towards the shack. Later the man dragged whatever it was deeper into the trees and buried it. Shook his head when Garrett asked if he needed help. Best not, he said, and wouldn't say more.   
  


iii

Gradually Garrett fell into the rhythm of their days.

She swept the hard packed earthen floor clean each day, and it was by her quiet industry that he marked out the days since there was no dawn or dusk or daylight, but only darkness. Their sibilant pigeon-tongue became as familiar to him as thieves' cant, and he started to pick up a little of it himself, echoing their lilting tones, the odd little rhythms of their dialect. He'd wake in the night to the sound of their lovemaking in their bed screened off by a tattered curtain, slow and languorous and tender. The slap of skin on skin, a stifled moan. And he'd roll over and bury his face in the bed-clothes and try not to listen.

Even the man's veiled hostility to him eased. A kind of cautious trust grew between them, and when Garrett dandled the child on his knee, his look of concentration was so intense even the man laughed. Garrett was used to handling fragile precious things, but none quite so wriggly or determined to claw out his one remaining eye. Glowering at him only made the man laugh harder. 

But it was the man who brought back the parchment. It wasn't the best likeness, but the scrunched up hollow of his missing eye would have given the game away if nothing else. The picture made him look sullen and bitter and dangerous. The man waited until the woman wasn't around and laid it on the table between them, his meaning clear: Garrett had to go. He was sorry, for it; of course he was sorry, and for once Garrett was almost ready to believe the lie.

  
  


iv

Being back in the City was like being a boy again, the constant scramble for enough food to stave off starvation. Easier in some ways, and harder in others. There were no tanneries to sell pails of collected dog shit to, but there weren't any bluecoats either, nor any guards or guilds or City Wardens. It was every man for himself, which might have made Garrett feel right at home once upon a time. It was the sort of world he could survive in, and not really so very different from the world he had survived in... except for the monsters. He might have left, except the whispers had it that things were worse elsewhere. That the City was the one isle of humanity left in the Trickster’s endless tanglewood. Garrett wasn’t sure he believed that, but the City was all he’d ever known, and so he stayed.

He stole what he could, prioritising food and goods over valuables, although it crushed his magpie heart just a little when he had to leave something glittery behind. There was a market for pretty shiny things still, but it was like trying to set up a fruit stall next to an orchard where the fruit was going ripe for the picking. There were jobs though, if you knew where to look: a scornful displaced noble, who wanted him to liberate a priceless family heirloom from a ruined mansion; a cherished wheel of cheese that needed digging up from a garden overrun with blinking eyeballs on stumps. That sort of thing.

Just like old times. Except that it wasn't bluecoats and guards he was evading these days, but monkeymen and giant spiders, nymphs and wasps the size of cats that laid their eggs in living manflesh.

He took shelter in the Downtowne district, in Ramirez's mansion. The house itself was mostly ruined, but in the basement the lingering sulphurous stink of the burricks seemed to have kept away the worst of the Trickster's creatures. The man’s pet burricks had been buried in pride of place in the garden, marked by the foundations of a partially-built mausoleum that would never now be finished -- that man really had loved his burricks.

He was safe enough for the moment, although the Trickster was stepping up the hunt for him. Not that he wasn't used to having the various factions baying for his blood, but what he wasn't used to was having his face staring back at him from every wall and post and pillar. Any thief might find that a little unnerving.

And the City was at war. The Hammerites, never ones to tolerate heresy of any shape or form had regrouped and reformed, waging a battle of attrition with the Trickster's creatures. Their leader was an odd choice, a curious man with a bizarre speech impediment, but there was no doubt Brother Karras had a kind of charisma. 

Garrett knew Karras a little: after his eye had been torn out it had been Karras who'd treated him, who'd spoken to him as gently as if he were a terrified animal, ready to twist and snap at whatever hand that touched him, no matter if it meant to help.

It had been Karras who'd made the suggestion, and Garrett hadn't been so far-descended into pain and madness that he hadn't recognised it was never quite a promise, that Karras might be able to restore his eye if he was successful in defeating the Trickster. Not an eye of flesh, he'd said, as that would be beyond even his powers, but something just as good. Perhaps even something better. It had never came to pass, and it never would now, but there'd been a gleam of fascination in Karras's eyes that Garrett hadn't liked then. He liked it even less now that Karras's madness seemed to have taken root and spread, infecting the other Hammerites.

It was Karras who had the bright idea of raising an army of haunts from the extensive graveyards and crypts. Every living human soul in the City, pagan or otherwise, had barricaded themselves in whatever ramshackle shelters they had and spent the night praying when that spectral army marched through the city. Garrett was unlucky enough to be out on the streets that night, and he sensed them before he saw them, felt them as an itching on the insides of his eardrums that made his flesh creep. On his side for once, although somehow he doubted they'd make the distinction if he was foolish enough to get in their way.

Still, of all people he might have expected to lead the Hammerites to war, it wouldn't have been Brother Karras. Genius he may have been, but he had a sly, oleaginous manner that always made Garrett feel like he needed to bathe. Then again he always felt like that these days.

  
  


v

In a quiet corner of the City, where the streets were narrow and full of winding alleys and echoing metal grates, a black market had grown up in the courtyard of what had once been a famously squalid, cut-price brothel. It was a run-down part of town, a choke of stews and slums and sweatshops, dominated by the workhouse and the wall that stood between the City of the living and the quarantined City of the dead. 

Garrett was cloaked and hooded, his face in shadows, his hair long enough now to retain its natural curl and falling over his eyes. He was attempting to make a trade with a woman who in the normal course of things he would have expected to gouge him for everything she could get, but he didn't like the way she kept peering at him. A little too closely, a little too sharply, as if she wanted to get a closer look at his missing eye.

Over the sound of the market bustle came a creaking sound, like a ship in sail. The ground seemed to shiver, and around him the market went still and quiet for a moment. Someone murmured something, and then the creaking sound came again, and the ground shuddered as something crashed into it.

A man barged into him, and a woman gave a stifled cry, as over the tops of the buildings a vast gnarled tree appeared, its hollow trunk wide enough to fit four men abreast. It leaned atop the brothel and glared malevolently into the courtyard, sending a shower of leaves and loose tiles and dead squirrels pattering down on the cobblestones. There were cries of fear as the crowd surged back, shoving at each other.

Retribution, someone was saying, for a copse of trees burned a few days ago. For each tree, a blood-price of ten human souls.

Garrett snatched up his bag and backed away, saw the woman he'd been trying to trade with muttering to a man, and both of them glancing his way.

Yips and screeches rang out as figures emerged from beneath the shadow of the tree, and the crowd began to panic in earnest, as the monkeys tore into the crowd, selecting at random one in ten and dragging them away, and hacking down anyone who resisted.

A woman stepped through the archway, moving lightly and lithely between the monkey men. Her skin was the fresh green of leaves budding in the spring, her hair entwined with vines, breasts small and high, and the hair between her legs mossy green.

Viktoria.

Time to make himself scarce, but as he turned to go, he found himself face to face with the stall keeper. Her eyes flared wide and she shoved past him, wringing her hands and calling to Viktoria, her tone servile, that she'd seen him, she'd seen that Garrett fellow, he was right there, right there in the crowd, and wasn't her ladyship and the lord of the green looking for him?

Viktoria spun, her eyes flashing, her gaze darting past the damn woman to lock with Garrett's, and he knew then it was too late -- he'd never be able to get away. Maybe the Builder would be merciful this time round and the brothel would collapse and crush him to death before they could hang him back up. He'd failed. Again.

Viktoria's arm whipped out in an underhand motion, the flesh melting into wood and thorns. It skewered the woman's abdomen, and drove up through her torso, the tip of the branch emerging from between her lips with a choking spray of black blood. Viktoria's gaze was on him again as she flung aside the dying woman, and the finger of her other hand rose mockingly to her lips to shush him. She mouthed the word: run.

And he would have done exactly that, except at that moment someone shouted that the sun was back. He froze, unable to stop himself from looking up, his heart as filled with hope as everyone else's as he stared up at the dull red glow in the sky. There was a chorus of joyous gasps and cries thanking the Builder at the sight, but they soon died uncertainly away. Garrett became aware of a stifling heat, of his skin tightening like he'd been sitting too close to a fire.

Not the sun, he thought -- whatever it was, it was sitting too low in the sky and in the wrong place, and it seemed to be growing.

It seemed, in fact, to be hurtling towards them.

As Garrett turned to flee the ball of fire in the sky exploded. The blast wave that surged out flung him from his feet. Later he'd learn the explosion had been the destruction of the mages' tower, a last stand against Constantine's army, but then all he knew was the dust and grit in his mouth, the stinging pain in his temple where a stone had struck him. On his knees in the dirt and rubble, he coughed and spat out dust. His ears were ringing. Somewhere, someone was screaming.

He stumbled to his feet, searching first for the bag which had been ripped from his hands in the explosion. No sign of his, but he did found another which might do for the minute, until he realised that it was attached to an arm and the arm wasn't attached to anything else. Grimly, he levered the fingers open. Waste not, want not.

His ears were still ringing when the screaming started up again. The wall, they were saying, the wall had fallen, and a fist of dread closed tight around his heart.

The explosion had breached the wall that sealed-off the section of the City where the dead walked. Beyond the breach there was silence: no sound but the ringing in Garrett's ears, the whispers and groans of the few people who'd survived the blast scrambling to their feet. No sign of Viktoria. The vast oak had been ripped into splinters, and the City would pay for that later, Garrett knew. But for now, there was silence.

At least until the first of the dead came stumbling through.

 


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Tafferling for betaing. As always, all comments are appreciated.

**Part Three**

i

On the corner of Baron's Walk and Slipwater Street, the corpse of a child had been strung up on a lamp-post. He was a boy of about nine or ten, dressed in City clothes, and it looked like he'd died slowly. A sign hung about his neck: 'I stole food', and the soles of his feet, with their widespread toes that had never had the chance to be cramped by shoes, were black with dirt.

Garrett eyed the poor little bastard, then ducked past him, stopping his breath against the reek of the boy's evacuated bowels. The side door to the office, a cut-price firm of lawyers, the sort you’d only use if you were desperate, had been boarded up at the start of the Encroachment of the Green, but Garrett squeezed through a loose panel at the bottom. He found himself in another world, one of wood panelling and green leather, ingrained with the sweetly acrid stink of cigar smoke, and all this world now covered in a layer of dust and grime, and shrouded with shadows.

Which suited Garrett. He'd never had much time for lawyers.

His footsteps barely made a whisper on the carpeted floor, but he stilled as a sound near the back of the offices drew his attention. There was a flicker of movement behind a glass-fronted cubicle, and a man emerged, still unaware of Garrett’s presence. He was solid and powerfully built, wielding a hammer heavy enough to crush a man's skull with one swipe: Brother Amicus, Karras's right-hand man and general skull cracker. Word was he'd cracked a lot of skulls. As Garrett stepped forwards and made his presence known, he wondered if it was Amicus who'd strung up the boy outside. He certainly looked like he wanted to string up Garrett.

Karras had a story to tell him. A tale about how the world used to be, back before their wondrous modern times, which weren't quite so wondrous these days. A tale of people huddled in their caves, shivering around their fires, terrified of the monsters that lurked outside in the darkness.

It was a thief that first stole fire from the gods, did Garrett know that? No reason why he should, no reason at all: the holy scriptures certainly didn't dwell on that long-dead thief, and deservedly so. Generous he might have thought himself – 'generous' was the lie thieves call themselves to cover the shame of their profession, didn't Garrett agree? – but that reckless, feckless thief had done those men and women no favours. It had taken the Builder to teach the people how that gift could be used to forge a new world – the art of bricks and stone and mortar, the glories of the hammer and the nail.

Give a man a fire and he may keep his family warm for the passing of a single winter. But give him a forge and bear witness to the wonders he can build.

Garrett was thinking how Karras reminded him of Constantine a little. Both of them had eyes that glittered with scarcely hidden sly amusement at a secret only they know. Both loved the sound of their own voices, particularly baffling in Karras's case. And they were both clearly completely insane.

Most of all, Karras, like Constantine before him, wanted to use Garrett.

Question was: would Garrett let him?

It was, when Karras finally got to the point, a simple job. A box of metal cylinders in the workshop of what had once been St Edgar's, the Hammerite cathedral in Stonemarket, long since defiled and desecrated. What Karras wanted them for he didn't see fit to share with Garrett, but the job would pay well, and these days it was handy to have a faction as powerful as the Hammerites on his side for once.

Whatever else Karras might be – and there was no doubt he was a _lot_ of things – at least he was fighting.

 

ii

After Karras's job was done and the box of cylinders delivered, Garrett took some of the food he'd scavenged to Basso's sister, who lived alone in the crumbling tenement she'd shared with her brother.

Garrett climbed the stairs, moved past other apartments with their doors smashed in. A little girl peered out at him through a gash in an splintered door, and whirled back inside when he nodded to her. From inside came a man's voice, low and soft with anger, accompanied by the muted thump of a fist into flesh. Garrett's steps faltered and then he kept on climbing.

He waited outside the door to Basso's apartment, while Basso's sister unlatched the door. She clung onto the door frame, cowed and blinking through her curtain of hair until she recognised him and let him in.

He unloaded his goods, and she cooked for him, a thin pottage poured over stale bread that went from rock-hard to slimy with no discernible intermediate stage. Garrett didn't care. It was the first hot meal he'd eaten in weeks, except for meat roasted over a fire (rat, mainly), and it tasted like the best thing he'd ever eaten.

Basso's sister watched him eat, not quite smiling. It was almost, but not quite, the same wry long-suffering expression that she'd worn in happier days, when he'd sat here listening to Basso opine on the state of the City, eating their food and drinking the wine he'd brought. Basso could talk the arse off a burrick, especially after a few drinks. But that was okay: it meant Garrett could kick back and get away with grunts and the occasional smart-arsed sarcastic comment that Basso would ignore, but which might draw a stifled chuckle from his sister. Sometimes even a sweet shy smile, quickly hidden. He'd watch her when Basso wasn't looking, wondering if she was a virgin. Wondering whether she'd be too shy to let him take her maidenhead.

And after the meal was over, Garrett might have offered to clear the table and scour the pans, trying to look like a good guest, when partly it was an excuse to brush against her, to try his jaundiced hand at flirting while getting some space from Basso's constant chatter. But it wasn’t just that.

Few of the series of shithole tenements Garrett stayed in had a kitchen at all, and those that did were never cooked in. He grabbed his food in passing on the street, from stalls and inns and chophouses and bakeries. But here at Basso's there was a woman cooking, the lingering heat from the stove and the sweet aroma of a fruit pie in the oven. And maybe there might be a moment or two, with his hands wrist deep in tepid water, when he could pretend that he was more than just an interloper here.

It was a kind of comfort, and that was one of the few things that hadn't changed.

 

iii

The sex was about as good as the hot meal. In other words not as great as it could have been, but he was so hungry for both he didn't much care. It might have been better if she'd let him pleasure her afterwards – he'd spent and she hadn't, and he wanted to redress that imbalance to show her he wasn't really a selfish lover (although a lot of the time he really _was_ ) – but she caught hold of his wrist and stopped him from sliding his hand down between her legs. Shook her head when he asked her if she wanted him to go, and, after she'd fished out the vinegar-soaked sponge from inside herself, she nestled into him, seeking warmth and human affection. And that was _fine_. Garrett could do that, even if the growing knot in his throat made him uncomfortable.

Her hair brushed against the underside of his jaw, and her hand rested on his belly, the tips of her splayed fingers nestling in the hollows of his ribs. He caught her studying his face a few times, but at least the look of shock she'd worn the first time she'd seen what had happened to his eye was long forgotten. Her fingers traced his prominent cheekbone beneath the hollow socket. He wanted to turn his head away, but let her look, and in his turn traced the fresh bruise along her collar bone, the dying blossoms of the older yellowing bruises on her chest, wondering who had given them to her.

 

iv

And in the night he woke to a noise out on the streets, someone screaming, and the gibbering simian screech of a troop intent on the hunt. A sudden smash against the latched shutters brought him fully awake, and by the way Basso’s sister flinched against him, she was awake now too, and most likely had been for some time. He wondered whether she’d slept at all. They lay there frozen, waiting for the smash to come again, for the shutters to shatter inwards. Nothing came; the whooping and screams for help quieted as the Hunt receded down the street.

Basso's sister shuddered, shaking with fear, and he wrapped his arm around her chest and pulled her close. He let her spoon into him, trying to offer her what reassurance he could, and he wasn't kidding himself: he knew it couldn't be much. Still, she pressed back against him, and after a while, once the street had settled back into silence, the warmth and closeness of her body awakened his.

This time he did slip his hand around and down between her legs, and tried to bring her along with him. She made a noise, a catch in her throat, and he thought maybe he'd succeeded, but when he turned her head so he could kiss her he found her cheeks wet with tears. And _that_ was a little distracting: a woman crying when you're trying to fuck her. But when he started to pull out, she reached back and clung on tight to his waist, hooked her ankles around the backs of his legs, and cried _harder_ , so he stayed inside. And then it was a matter of summoning up every filthy fantasy he could conjure to stop himself going soft. He managed it, just, although when he pulled out he was already fully limp, trailing his seed across the backs of her thighs.

No sponge soaked in vinegar this time. Instead she rose from the bed with an apologetic grimace, and squatted over a bowl to douche with the substance she used to stop his seed from taking root inside her. She didn't look at him, her dark hair hanging over her face, and he wasn't sure if it was her tears that she was trying to hide or the defiant look shining in her dark eyes, as if he would have tried to stop her. As if he'd blame her for not wanting to bring a child into this. As if they didn't have enough damn problems already.

She flinched away when he touched her, then sagged against him when he pulled her into an embrace. She missed her brother: that was all, she told him, shaking. She missed Basso.

And Garrett promised, same as he did every time he came here, for sex and shelter, a hot meal and a warm bed and a willing, if not always exactly welcoming, body, that he'd keep an eye out for her brother. Basso still owed him money, after all, and that earned him a weary half-smile and a hopeful look. They both knew it was a lie. Basso wouldn't be coming back.

She took him to bed one last time before he left, and this time he didn't manage it at all. He couldn't sustain his cock-stand, no matter how hard they tried, and in the end they both gave up and nestled together. He dozed for a while, but he was never going to be able to get back to sleep after that crash against the shutters. He knew only too well how easy shutters like that were to jemmy open, and how vulnerable that left them, even with the door locked and bolted. Finally he rose, and crossed naked to the window, where light seeped in through the broken shutters. He must have still been half-asleep, still in the hopeful grip of dreams, because he let himself think it might finally be the dawn. Of course, it wasn't.

Somewhere in the City, something was burning.

 

v

He'd meant to leave before she woke up, since he didn't want to face the inevitable goodbyes, her dying hope that this time maybe he'd stay to look after her, to protect her. No point telling her his face and name was all over the City, and while the Hammerites were on his side (or more accurately thought he was on theirs) there were plenty of others who'd turn him in. He had no way of knowing if there was anyone left who might remember Garrett was an old associate of Basso's, and oh, hey, Basso might be dead, but didn't he have a sister? Garrett was no sort of protection at all, and if she had any sense she wouldn't have let him in.

No, he was wrong there: if she'd had any sense she'd already have sold him out by now for whatever his scarred and broken carcass was worth.

He left her more food than he'd intended to, including all the cans. Most of them were dented, so chances were they'd gone bad anyway, and they were too heavy for him to haul around from place to place. So he told himself anyway, in an attempt to silence the bitter voice in his heart, the one that was terrified of starving to death. The whipped-dog voice that told him he might as well steal food out of the mouths of children, because they'd die soon enough, and it was kinder to let that happen quickly, rather than let them live on in a world like this.

So he'd meant to slip out when she was sleeping, but when he glanced at the bed, he found her eyes were open. He hesitated at the door, and if she'd spoken up then, if she'd called out to him and begged him to stay, he might have done exactly that. But she said nothing, only watched him slip back out into the darkness without a word.

 

vi

There was a rat inside the glass terrarium. Karras watched it with the quiet glee of a child who'd learnt his first sleight of hand trick and was excited to share. The rat's brindled belly slid up against the side of the glass, its whiskers twitching. Its tail brushed against the metal cylinder Karras had placed so carefully, so reverently inside. Brother Amicus loomed behind Garrett, a little too close in a way that made the back of Garrett's neck itch. In a way that told him his future wellbeing was going to depend very much on how he reacted to what Karras called his little demonstration.

It was awful, even though Garrett was no great fan of rats. Karras produced a handheld device with a flourish, a brass clockwork mechanism small enough to be cupped in the palm of his hand. As he – thusly – twisted the dial, Garrett tensed up, expecting... what? An explosion? A firestorm raging inside the tank? Neither one happened. Only a barely audible sibilant hiss, and a stream of crimson smoke streaming from the cylinder, staining the air inside the tank red.

The rat screamed. It thrashed, clawing at the air, tail writhing, while its body shrank before his eyes, crumpling inwards like a decaying corpse. The flesh shrank away, melting from the bones like rendered fat, leaving skin stretched drum-tight over its ribs, then the skin flaked away, and then even the bones crumbled to an ochre-coloured dust. A pile of powdered rust.

Karras's eyes gleamed. See, see what I have done, his expression said. There was a sick sensation in Garrett's throat. Amicus was close behind him now, his thigh pressed against the back of Garrett's upper arm, and Garrett could smell his sweat and the clinging odour of the Hammerite factories, oil and smoke and unwashed genitals and sour body odour all mingling together. Smell him and almost hear his grip shifting impatiently around the handle of his hammer.

Karras had a plan.

And maybe there was madness in Karras's eyes, but weren't they all a little bit mad these days? So Garrett might have thought, anyway, until the rest of Brother Karras's plan was made clear. That it wasn't just the plants and monsters he sought to destroy, but _everything_.

A few could be saved, naturally, and if Garrett had the names of any people he deemed suitable he should be sure to let Karras know. Women, in particular: the fragile sex would be vital if they were to set about the task of repopulating the City. After all, what would be the point of defeating the Trickster and liberating the City if there was no one around to enjoy it?

And as for the pagans, well, they'd die with their heathen god, as was only right and proper. No space for heretics in Brother Karras's new world. But they'd be able to make space for Garrett. There was always a spot for men with talents like his, especially the ones who were smart enough to know when to let themselves be used.

Garrett stared at the metal cylinder inside the tank, a nauseous feeling twisting in his belly. It might be their chance, perhaps the only one remaining, after the sun had been swallowed by the Trickster's wolves.

He could be a lord. The new baron. Or he could crown himself if he preferred. Why not? He'd have more wealth and power and women than he could count, and wasn't that what he'd always wanted?

He went for a piss before he gave his answer, the privy little more than a cramped cupboard with a board of splintered oak. The hole had a clear drop onto a turgid underground stream, and the air was foetid with the lingering smell of an open sewer. For a moment or too, Garrett contemplated levering up the board and escaping that way. But then he'd be ducking the Hammerites as well as the Trickster's people: he didn't need another faction on his back.

When he came out, he begged time to think it over. And Karras eyed him thoughtfully but let him walk away. It was insane, it was pure lunacy, but Karras's madness was the sort of spark that lit a wildfire. After everything they'd seen, after what had happened to the City, was it any wonder they were ready to crack a few heads of their own? To burn the whole mess down and start afresh.

What if? What if he could end this, or damage the Trickster and his monsters enough to turn the tide? To give Karras and the other Hammerites a chance to fight back?

What if?

 

vii

He went to the Keepers. He hadn't meant to, but the roundabout route he'd chosen, intended to throw off anyone who might be shadowing him, took him through Stonemarket. Crouching in the shadows until a pair of the monkey creatures had loped past, he looked up, and saw the Keeper's compound shimmering like a mirage on the skyline.

He'd always avoided going to them for answers. Even when he'd been one of them. But now he'd run out of places to go.

The door had been sealed tight, but the iron key he wore around his neck slid with ease into the keyhole. The lock snapped open with a shiver of breaking seals.

He wasn't sure what he was expecting to find inside. Artemus, perhaps, waiting as if he'd known Garrett was coming. Or Orlund, as condescending and sneery as ever. Secrets and cryptic prophecies, none of which meant a damn thing to anyone with any sense.

Except he didn't find Artemus. Or Orlund. Or any of them. They'd gone.

Inside the compound the air was stale, as if it had been sealed tight until he'd unlocked the door. There was not a whisper, not a soul, only rats and cold stone and Garrett's echoing footsteps. In the cavernous library, the shelves had been stripped bare. Garrett crossed the bridge towards the podium where the Translator and Interpreter had always sat, and no droning whispers or the skritching of quills on parchment rose up to meet him.

A charred smell grew stronger as he wound his way down a spiral staircase, knowing, even as he took the last turn of the staircase what he was going to find, and hardly able to bring himself to believe it. At the bottom he was stunned into frozen silence at the sight.

They'd burned the books. Most likely not all of them – they'd have taken the most precious volumes with them, the books and prophecies that could never be replaced – but all the rest, and there must have been thousands, had been piled high and set alight. His disbelief felt like a weight on his shoulders, crushing the breath out of him.

Always since he'd met Artemus, even after he'd left their ranks, he'd been aware of them, watching him. Spying on him, he'd called it, and might even have claimed he hated it, that he wished they'd leave him alone and cease manipulating his life from afar. It had infuriated him that still they sought to control him, to guide his path, however light their hand.

And now they were gone. They'd abandoned him. Because he was their stone, rolling downhill... and he'd failed.

He kicked out at the ash, then squatted and sifted through it, scraps of charred paper drifting through his fingers. All that knowledge, which he'd never thought he treasured, all of it burned. He would never have thought it possible of them: the _Keepers_ , of all people, but to prevent centuries of accumulated knowledge from falling into the hands of the Trickster, then perhaps...

He wiped his hands and straightened up. A light-headed rush left him wavering on his feet.

No one here waiting for him to find them. No answers either. He was alone. For the first time since he was a kid and he realised his mother wasn't coming back, he was truly on his own.

 

viii

The bastards had taken all of the food, but there was some firewood left and he stoked a fire, caught and roasted a rat over the flames, ate sitting at the table in the refectory, stripping what little meat there was from the rat's delicate bones and leaving them in a pile on the table. No plate, not even a trencher.

Afterwards he roamed the vast building, stripped bare of almost all its secrets except the ones that could never be erased. Like the wall where a boy bigger and stronger than him had smashed his face into the stonework, and then kicked him in the balls while he lay stunned and helpless and crying.

There wasn't much he could loot, but some linens had been left behind in the laundry room. The faint lingering smell of lavender clung to them, although it was almost drowned out by the smell of mildew. Those he could sell on or trade, keeping a couple of them back for Basso's sister.

And finally, finally, once he'd combed through the entire building, he found himself in the one place he hadn't wanted to come, shivering in the doorway.

His old cell, tiny and cramped, with its plain oak desk and the bed. Like any room where young men slept, the smell of his adolescence, the reek of sweat and seed, seemed to have soaked into the wall. He dragged a chair in front of the door, and barricaded himself in as best he could.

His sleep was uncomfortable and restless, and when he woke in the gloom, he lay still for a moment, then sat up, holding his breath. Nothing there. No one watching. He spoke into the darkness, thinking with the sleep still clinging to him that if they heard him, they'd come. A glyph would gleam bright on the wall and Artemus would step through the stone and welcome him back into the fold.

Nothing. No one came. Just the darkness, and Garrett's own breath, and the scratch of rats' claws on stone.

When he was certain no one was coming – and he'd known, really, that they wouldn't – he dropped back down and pressed his hand over his eyes. Then he slid sideways, and dropped underneath the bed, dragging his looted covers with him. It was a tight squeeze for him now – he was bigger than he was as a boy, and there wasn't room for him to lie on his side any more without the slats digging painfully into his shoulder. Instead he lay on his back, and built himself a nest with the bedclothes, trying not to think about the rats. Up there, on the bed, he was too exposed.

Strange though: he hadn't thought like that since he was a boy.

He reached up, and ran his fingers along the rows of carved notches he'd made, his own little calender. Each notch was a tally, a reckoning of his days. One more day. Still alive. And there, a few slats up, his name or a close approximation, carved into the wood: _garet_

He'd done it thinking another boy might find it, one day off in the future. Find it and wonder who he was and what had happened to him. He'd never thought that boy might be himself.


End file.
